Engineering team shortlisted for Pearson Award

The Engineering Education Team at South Eastern Regional College (SERC) have been shortlisted for a prestigious Pearson National Teaching Award as Further Education (FE) Team of the Year 2024.

The 30-strong team of full-time and part-time lecturing staff bring industry specific qualifications and experience to over 1,000 engineering and manufacturing students across SERC.

The shortlist recognises their dynamic approaches to transforming education and the industry, through implementation of several programmes to enhance students' education experience and to address key national and local industry workforce gaps.  Since 2021, the We Can Engineer It initiative has engaged with women and girls to promote engineering as a career choice; members of the team have volunteered as STEM Ambassadors to help young people, especially females, excel in the industry, and the female lecturers have supported the Career Ready post-16 programme by mentoring female engineers.  

The Team has established an Employers Forum to ensure students are ‘work ready’ for the industry; helped develop the Project STEM units shared with the Manufacturing & Engineering Growth and Advancement (MEGA) network of businesses; and Thales UK has invested in an engineering skills academy to train 15 higher-level apprentices, five of which are studying at SERC.  

Developing strategies for learner engagements, their work ensures that SERC students are exposed to project-based learning (PBL), active learning in practical scenarios, engagement with the wider Engineering community via competition entry, guest speakers, live projects, and interfacing with the community and industry to promote engineering to hard-to-reach communities and they have supported and mentored students in setting up the student-led SERC Engineering Society.

Their industry networks include a 10-year international partnership with the National Institute of Technology in Toyama College, Japan, which enabled exploratory visits that exposed SERC students to the robotics industry.

Find out more about engineering courses at SERC commencing September 2024.

Winners will be announced on National Thank a Teacher Day on 19 June 2024.

Above: Representing the team (L-R) Trudy Patterson, Curriculum Manager for Engineering, Darren Anderson, Lecturer with responsibility for Industry 4.0 and Aine McGreeghan, Deputy Head of School of Engineering at SERC.